John Keats

John Keats (/ˈkiːts/ 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an EnglishRomantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.

Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death, and by the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through the emphasis of natural imagery. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature.

Biography

Keats worked for the Washington Daily News in the 1950s. His debut as an author came in 1956 with The Crack in the Picture Window, a broadside at sprawling suburban housing developments. He also wrote numerous magazine articles, which led to non-fiction books and biographies.

In the 1950s, Keats bought "Pine Island", one of the Thousand Islands, as a vacation home for himself, his wife and their three children. However, at the time of his death in 2000, he was living in Kingston, Ontario, where he had moved in order to be close to the island featured in his 1974 book Of Time and an Island.